


the wild hunt

by peaksykid



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Blaseball Cares Exhibition Game, Gen, References to Folklore, References to Norse Religion & Lore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:34:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28065546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peaksykid/pseuds/peaksykid
Summary: “Do you refuse, then?”“What?”“To join. We ride tonight.”----Jessica Telephone encounters something from long before.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 18





	the wild hunt

The wind on the prairie is cold. Jessica had learned this, after enough nights walking home from the wooden shack way out past the outfield, way out past the other wooden shack that they keep kindling and firewood in for team bonding nights. From scuffing her cleats in the dirt to keep the time, on the way back, after she’d called and called enough on that old forgotten line and accepted even just for once that no one is picking up.

She’d found the old shack when a foul had flown out there. She couldn’t remember if she was the one who hit it or not. Someone, sometime, had left a bunch of old equipment there, of all sorts--wires and cords, old televisions, rusted metal she couldn’t identify the pieces of. A beat-up radio with a bent antenna. A device for measuring radiation that beeped whenever she looked at it funny. But what she came for was the operator board--she hadn’t seen one of these in decades, and it seemed like it hadn’t been used in longer than that.

It called to her, in the way that these things do. She would sit out there for hours, whenever no one in particular needed her, and listen, cords wrapped around her arms, eyes closed, hooked in to the frequency, and recite numbers out loud, in a clear, soft voice, flicking switches after every tenth digit, waiting, counting the instances, before the call dropped.

The Mints had made her promise to stop falling asleep out there, presumably because they were worried about her, but there was a cynical part of her that thought they just were mad she didn’t spend the time practicing, or batting, or staying within eyesight of them. Like they were afraid that if they looked away for long enough, she’d flicker out of sync; now you see her, now you don’t.

So she makes herself trudge home, instead of resting her head on her forearms and pushing her curly hair underneath to make some semblance of a pillow, instead of drifting off listening to the static, fading away behind the buzzing in the background, and waking up with indentations in her arms where she’d leaned on the wires. Makes herself close and latch the door, heads back across the grassy-Meadow-outside-of-town, takes the little shuttle bus back into town and wraps herself in blankets at her apartment, alone and too quiet, quiet and too alone.

Or she does, most nights. 

Tonight, she lingers, because the wind on the prairie feels...wrong.

She is walking across the field, looking stubbornly down at the ground instead of up at the clear stars, when something cold, sharp, bright, silver brushes past her, somewhere between second and third base.

She looks up with a start, feels her hand instinctively snap to her waist and close around the handle of the Dial Tone, stabilizes herself, blinks, whirls around. 

Nothing is there, that she can see visually, but she can feel a presence, of a sort. A displacement of air, a wrong spot in the balance. Carefully, she opens her channels one by one, taps a few buttons, tries to reach out.

It is a mistake. She is buffeted back by a coldness, feels her feet  _ leave the ground _ for a split second, feels the dirt kicked up from around her and sees the stars--too clear, too defined, she realizes, and in the wrong places, for this time of year in Kansas--whorl clockwise above her. 

She senses her body crashing to the ground, as if thrown backwards, onto her back. And there is a  _ wave _ of sound. Of the trampling of hooves, of a host of voices shouting, of something just behind her in that way that made her afraid to get up and turn around. Of the barking of dogs, of the rumbling of thunder, and then, just for a second, of a sort of exhilaration that she hasn’t felt in  _ years _ , longer than blaseball years, years like decades like centuries, like coming in on the eights right on time, like the sort of shifting she used to do before she gave up on it, before she stopped hoping there was something hidden in the past or future worth breaking time to see.

She has to get up, she thinks. She pushes herself onto her elbows, and looks upwards with a wildness, to see a ring around the sun.

Jessica Telephone knows what this means, even dreaming. She stumbles to her feet, hand on the receiver. A game has already begun.

Instinct takes over, now. She knows it to be true in her body before she knows it in her mind--what you are meant to do when you hear the roar of the crowd, when you feel the ball rushing past you, but stronger than that, what you are meant to do when you hear the voices wail-singing around you, the glint of metal, the Valkyries calling, the blood in rivulets like the rain, before they had given such a thing a name. 

Faces, in the fog. People she recognizes. Nagomi Mcdaniel, and York Silk, York clinging to the back of her chitinous arm, tiny eyes dull and without luster, without the red glow that something inside Jess thinks should glimmer behind them. Pudge, sweet thing that he is, from the Mints back home, but with no light in his smile, a distant mountain range reflected, nothing to say. On the mound, Polkadot, an aura of the Trench about them, but as if drawn in with pencil, only in concept, not in execution. 

And at the plate--

_ “Stop it,”  _ she says, out loud, all pretenses of friendliness lost.  _ “Whatever you are, stop it. This isn’t funny.” _

Sebastian Telephone raises his head, fluffy, ever-tousled hair burnt on the edges. He smiles too wide, tilts to the left, locks all three eyes on hers, but there is no recognition behind them. Or not, at least, recognition she knows to be that of her brother.

He stands the same six-foot height he did in life, but wrong somehow, like he’s been stretched out at the ends, like the whole field looks just when the black hole decides to rear its ugly head.

“ _ We can only be what you have seen,”  _ a voice forces itself from his mouth. “ _ We can only be where you have been,” _ it hisses and it howls, and Sebastian’s grip on the bat tightens, and the edges of his uniform, some odd symbol with an exclamation point, fade in and out, one second charred and burnt, one second pristine as folded.

Jess curls her fingers inside her glove, and does not break eye contact.

_ “What do you want with me. Just tell me and go away.”  _ She does not have any patience for games.

The thing that looks like her brother smiles somehow wider, and adjusts itself back up, untilting its head with an audible rigor mortis crack. His hands’ grip tighten on the bat.

Somewhere, Polkadot Patterson throws the ball. Sebastian--she can’t bring herself not to call him Sebastian--swings too fast, too smooth.

He bursts into flame before the bat even connects.

Jessica  _ screams _ .

He doesn’t stop burning. He has not broken eye contact. Polkadot keeps pitching, and the flame-bound thing that was her brother stands still as a strike whizzes past.

This is different, the third time, she finds herself thinking, somewhere outside her body. The flames are wrong, they are burning too long, too high and thin, and so, so  _ blue _ . She is vaguely aware of sound, of dialup, of ringing, coming from her mouth in protest, but right now, it is all she can do to think that this feels  _ off _ , like a facsimile of an incineration, like a moment in a painting.

A painting. She is shifting, suddenly, in a way she hasn’t done in  _ seasons, _ to a time she hasn’t visited in years and years and years. There is a fur cloak around her shoulders, her hands are calloused underneath winter gloves and her hair is tied up in braids behind her cap, a brooch at her chest with ten little circles clinks against the wire, and it is snowing, and it is hailing, and the sky is white.

And Sebastian, or what was Sebastian, is still at the plate, and something whizzes again past him, a strike, but not a ball, an arrow, flinted and feathered with a long blue tail, and she hears it notch into a tall tree somewhere behind him, and still he does not move. And she is shouting at him,  _ get out of the way, get out of the way, they’re coming, they’re coming _ , and he is not listening, though she can’t well blame him, he’s cinders by now.

The arrow connects with something, and is reflected, and finally the flames that were Sebastian disperse, so fast, the wind carrying them away like branches, like pine needles, like debris, like they were physical. Something else is standing there, where he was, and Jessica feels afraid in a familiar way, familiar as in ancient, as in strange, as in elden tradition. A figure in a wide hat, something behind it, many things, with hooves and teeth and nails, champing at the bit, reins in its hand.

_ “Are they now? Are they coming?”  _ it says, and looks at her, and for a second its face shifts to that of, of all fucking people,  _ Landry Violence, _ but in blue, in ice, in sharp stalagmite, and she has to laugh out loud, because it’s so out of place, even though a part of her understands this is the way of dreaming.

It scoffs. “ _ Is this not what the form signifies, to you? The call of war? The hounds? The peal of bells? The blood on the sword, the matted cloak, the thunder?” _

Something of it makes sense to Jess, in the old part of her brain.

_ “Violence, yes, I guess--” _

_ “Violence. You understand,”  _ it cuts her off, paces in the snow and dust. The plate is not visible anymore. She isn’t even sure if they are still playing. Of course they are still playing. All things are a game in time.

_ “Get to the point,”  _ she says.  _ “Or are you just going to show me more of my family dying.” _

_ “You have more? I wasn’t aware,”  _ it grins, smug, and Jessica wants to smash its face in, to see pieces of ice shatter into the trees and embed like bullets, to see the life leave it and she’s halfway the distance between first and home plate before she catches herself, makes herself pull her arm back down from where she was about to beat it with the Dial Tone, half-phone-bat-half-ancient-sword now, the crossguard scraping against her knuckles. 

She forces it down, makes herself stop moving, spits out the rage no matter how sweet it tastes.

_ “Stop baiting me. What do you want.” _

_ “Do you refuse, then?” _

_ “What?” _

_ “To join. We ride tonight.” _

Jessica understands, in a way beyond words, what is happening, and there is a part of her heart that sings for it. That wants to see the sodden ground rent in two by the hoofbeats of horses, wants to take her legendary weapon and drive it all the way through someone’s chest and feel the bones crack and force the resistance of flesh against metal, wants to tangle her hands in the tiny braids in her hair and scream at the storm above, to follow the sounding of the horn, to race with them like tornadoes through the wood destroying all that they touch.

The glory is not unfamiliar to her. She ran with them once, in another life, she thinks, and if she squeezes her eyes shut, she can feel the blood running under her nails, can see the roar of the fires, lean into the motion of riding, reach deep into the great visceral ribcage of the thing they killed that night and pull out its guts, sinews wrapped around her fingers like the cord she never stops fidgeting with.

She knows this, the Wild Hunt. The Wild Hunt knows her, but she cannot accept its call, and she knows this.

She takes the Dial Tone in her hand, promises to herself silently that she will get it back in seconds, to give her fingers the courage and the confidence to let go, and hurls it down at the ground, hears it bounce, more sword than bat at the moment, on the snow, and settle, indented in the snowdrift. She restrains herself from immediately reaching down to grab it.

The figure before her smiles.

_ “So you do remember how this works, then,”  _ it says. It’s still wearing some semblance of Landry’s face, but so, so cold now, and ice hangs off the cuffs of the denim jacket.  _ “Very well then, shame. We would have liked to ride with you.” _

Jess says something, in a language she hasn’t been spoken in years, but she forgets what it is as soon as it leaves her mouth. The figure turns away from her, and she can see the spines of the icicles piercing through its hat. It scrambles up upon one of the beasts that stood in its shadow--and now Jess can see them, in their horrible glory, all edges and teeth and seeming--raises its hand, points forward, kicks its mount and charges with them, into the woods, and Jess forces her eyes shut so as only to hear the sound. The sound, and the sound, and the sound.

It fades as she wakes lying on the field of the meadow outside of town, a lingering call of the horn. It is a poor substitute for the ringing, she thinks, dusting the infield dirt off of her pants, but for the moment, it’ll do.

**Author's Note:**

> From Wikipedia: The Wild Hunt is a folklore motif that that historically occurs in the folklore of various Northern European cultures. Wild Hunts typically involve a 'soul-raving' chase led by a mythological figure escorted by a ghostly or supernatural group of hunters passing in wild pursuit. Seeing the Wild Hunt was thought to presage some catastrophe such as war or plague, or at best the death of the one who witnessed it. People encountering the Hunt might also be abducted to the underworld or the fairy kingdom. In some instances, it was also believed that people's spirits could be pulled away during their sleep to join the cavalcade.
> 
> \---  
> Sooooooooo Denim Chilly huh?  
> A note, apparently in some versions of the myth if you encounter the leader of the Wild Hunt, you're supposed to throw down a piece of metal on the ground in front of you, so that's why Jess throws her bat.


End file.
